“Good luck with that—though let me make one suggestion,” he said, “If you’re writing pulp, you might want to use a pen name. If you do decide to return to journalism—and I definitely hope you do—you won’t worry about any anti-pulp writer prejudices hurting your career.”
Joy’s mouth dropped open. A pen name! That was brilliant. She’d use a pen name. Why hadn’t she done it already? Well—of course, because journalists don’t do that. But that was her whole problem—that she still imagined herself a real journalist while working for the Gazette. Garai wouldn’t care about what name she used. Why would he care, so long as she produced a good story? “Professor, thank you! That’s a great idea,” she said, and hugged him.
“Oh, no problem,” he said. “That’s what we elders are here for. Tell me your pen name when you think of it. I’d like to read your story.”
“Uh… sure, when I think of it,” said Joy, “Though I don’t think you actually want to read it. I don’t expect it to be any good. Just collecting a paycheck until I can save up enough to move.”
“You’re moving?” Professor Gelfland asked. “Where to?”
“Not sure yet,” she said, feeling a rising urge to escape as the conversation veered onto dangerous territory. “Someplace where it’s not… not so competitive. I need… I need a break, that’s all. Just have to save up a bit first.”
“Well, if money’s an issue, why I don’t I just loan you some?”
It felt like the whole world dropped out from beneath her. “What?” was the best she could manage. “You can’t do that. It’s too much. You can’t… waste your money on—”
“I won’t be wasting anything. This is an investment. And a good one,” he said. “The real waste is someone with your talent grinding away at something she’s not passionate about.”
“No—I… I’m sorry. Thank you, Professor. I have to go. Enjoy the show. Goodbye!” And Joy fled the scene as fast as she could, lest she have a complete breakdown.
Chapter 25
Joy Is A Liar
A few blocks later, Joy stopped speed-walking at a shady alcove with white marble pillars. She leaned back up against one of the pillars and took long, deep breaths, until she could deal with the reality of what a bunch of warmed-over garbage she was.
She couldn’t believe she’d done that—stood in front of her favorite teacher and lied through her teeth. She lied about what she was doing, who she was working for, and for a while she’d imagined herself to be so clever at hiding it. “Yay, pen name!” Now she could do an even better job of concealing how she was betraying every sacred value of good journalism that Professor Gelfland had taught her to cherish. And, at the end, he’d offered her money. Said it was a “good investment.” What a joke. Her?
She should’ve told the truth. Right from the beginning, she should’ve owned up to what happened. Why hadn’t she? Because the thought made her nervous? Really, what did she think Professor Gelfland would say?
She remembered their conversation. “Flynn hasn’t been giving you a hard time, has he?” That was one of the first things he’d said, jokingly. The expected answer was “no,” or “working hard, learning lots,” or something. Flynn Hartmann had been one of Professor Gelfland’s star students who’d made it big. He’d recommended him to her and vice-versa. Professor Gelfland had known Flynn for years longer than he’d known her. If she told him that Flynn had been a moral coward and a shit boss, would he have really believed her? Or would he make excuses, say she’d gone too far in defending herself from assault. Would he ask her what she’d been wearing?
Joy had to quell another wave of anxiety, mixed up with hefty doses of panic and despair. Lir’s balls, why was she still like this? Some asshole tried to shove her into a broom closet and she’d decked him and gotten fired and that had been months ago so why oh why was she still acting so fragile? Was she going to let that ruin her life forever? She needed to toughen up. Rise above. Don’t let the bastards win.
The anger gave her a spark of energy, enough to climb out of the cauldron of boiling emotion and put the lid on, though she still couldn’t rid herself of any of it. Standing around feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to help her with anything. What had she just learned? She could use a pen name to protect her reputation for the future; she wouldn’t have to torch the Gazette’s archives when she quit. Yippee for her.
What else? Someone, maybe the government, was pushing the Red Specter character so hard that they were willing to do it at a loss. Interesting, but did it help her story? Not that she could see. Maybe those compilation books could help, but, even as ridiculously cheap as they were, she couldn’t spare the funds to buy them. She still had the Professor’s address, and she could try to swing by later and borrow his, but, aside from the potential awkward disaster that could turn into, he’d already told her that the Red Specter’s character wasn’t going to be significantly more developed than in the stories she’d already read.
But that was by design. The Specter’s character was kept intentionally vague, so people could subconsciously project themselves or their lost loved ones into him, and if that was true…
…If that was true, then the whole idea of trying to corner him for an interview was misguided. A good interview dug deep into the heart and mind of its subject, drawing out specific, memorable details about their lives. But any specific detail she revealed about the Red Specter’s character would lessen his appeal. People would read her story and come away feeling dissatisfied, even if they couldn’t say why, because whatever details she invented were sure to fall short of their projected hopes and dreams. She’d be revealing how the magician did his trick, which even The Great Phantasmo wouldn’t do, not even to prepare them against frauds. “All I’d show to you is that magicians are blatant liars, neither as skilled or clever as you imagine,” he’d said. “I’d ruin magic for you forever, and I won’t be responsible for that.” No, leave that task for Ms. Joy Song Fan.
So, the assignment was impossible, after all—or impossible to do well, which was just as bad. She was being set up for failure, yet again. She leaned back against the pillar and put her head in her hands. What had she ever done to deserve this? Was she being punished for something she’d done in a past life or something? Lately it felt like the whole world was conspiring against her, looking down and judging. Joy felt a prickle down her spine, like someone really was watching her. She snapped her head up, looking around at the milling Sunday crowd, but nobody seemed to be paying her any mind.
Well, of course they were. Everybody was occupied with their own business. They had better things to do than mess with her. The world wasn’t out to get her. It just didn’t care about her, one way or the other.
So, if that was how it worked, why should she care, either? Why was she killing her feet and driving herself nuts running around for this stupid damned story, or for anything. It was garbage fake news—everything she didn’t believe in, and the story would flop anyway, no matter how much work she did, and she was so tired, and fed up, so maybe she should pack it in, and admit defeat, instead of—-
No! By every misbegotten abomination of the Abyss, no freakin’ way!
Once again, a hot undercurrent of rage came to her rescue. It blasted through her mind and cleared out a heavy fog, one that she hadn’t even realized was there. The entire street scene snapped into a heightened focus—scents became sharper, sounds became crisper, colors more vibrant.
And her mind snapped into gear, like an analytical engine that had just been fixed. And her mind told her that she could never quit.
If she quit, they would win. They could never say they’d beaten her as long as she didn’t give up. She wouldn’t let them win—not Quintus, nor Flynn, not anybody who’d ever doubted her and told her she couldn’t do something. She didn’t care how rotten and nonsensical this stupid Red Specter story was—she was going to finish it and she was going to get fucking paid and she was going to leave this lousy city and find a real newsp
aper where she could do real news and she was going to become the best fucking reporter that Kallistrate had ever seen.
Something weird had really happened down by the docks three nights ago, and, as a reporter, she was going to find out what it was—for the sake of practice, if for nothing else. Then she would track down Thiago and the last person on Garai’s list, and if she still had nothing useful….
…Well, at the very least, she could return to Garai with what she had and explain why a Red Specter interview was actually a terrible idea—maybe they could switch the focus of the story to something better. The idea of asking Garai for help and feedback felt new and different. She realized she’d been thinking of him purely as an obstacle, but maybe that didn’t have to be the case. Maybe she could learn a few things from him, even if they would never apply to her later career as a real journalist.
Head buzzing with renewed ideas, Joy pulled her city map from her purse, plotted a course to the docks on the south side of Dodona, and started walking, leaving the glitz of Chontos Blvd. behind her.
Part V
Chaos at the Docks
Chapter 26
Dockside Blight
Forty minutes later, Joy reached the dockside district facing out into Dodona Harbor. Her feet were killing her, so she searched for a resting-place. Lately Joy had grown accustomed to walking most places throughout the city, but today had been a new record for her, and her calves and thighs were making their complaints felt.
And she wasn’t seeing any convenient place to sit down. There were plenty of crates and barrels that could potentially be used as seats, but those tended to have large men in sea-stained clothes either hauling them away or stacking other crates on top of them.
And most of the decent resting spots she’d seen on the way over tended to be occupied. The hidden and not-so-hidden areas of this district were home to scores of men and occasionally women camped out in all the spots that might afford a bit of shelter or respite. They tended to be skinny, wearing dirty, raggedy clothes, with long, unkempt hair and beards, sometimes twisted into thick, ropey strands.
Some of the more organized among them had constructed makeshift shelters for themselves out of abandoned boxes and crates. Most were not that organized, and many didn’t appear to be organized on any level whatsoever. They lay motionless, the whites of their eyes showing both above and below their irises, small pipes made of glass or porcelain clutched in their fingers, stained with some tar-black residue. Spike pipes. She tried to give them as wide a berth as she could, but the clutter of refuse choking the sidewalks sometimes forced her close enough to notice that some of the poor wretches were wearing the tattered remnants of Kallistrate military uniforms. She couldn’t tell if these were actual veterans, or if they had simply acquired surplus uniforms as clothing.
On two occasions she saw men stalking around on random paths zig-zagging across the street, muttering curses, carrying on a vicious argument with no-one she could see, shaking with a fury whose cause she couldn’t know, and whose target she couldn’t guess. But even those weren’t as dangerous as some of the hangers-on, single men lounging around and trying to get her attention as she walked past, sometimes yelling out catcalls. She stayed alert, didn’t engage, and kept moving. Fortunately, no-one tried to follow her for more than a block.
The speed at which the streets of Dodona switched from being a vibrant urban culture to a cracked-brick wasteland dizzied her. It had gotten rough barely a block after she turned off Chontos and got worse the further she went. That lasted right up to the point where she crossed the train tracks, as sharp a demarcation as she could imagine. Instantly dissolution was replaced by industry, and the presence of people engaged in productive work, toiling on the arteries of the shipping lines drawing sustenance into the city. They had lives—something to strive for, and something to potentially lose.
She couldn’t say that with any confidence about the pitiful lost souls she’d passed on the way here. Walking past those alleyways had been like traversing the land of the dead, or the half-dead, maybe. Part of her felt guilty for fearing those poor wretches, the ones lying zoned-out in their tiny homes of makeshift garbage, but exactly what would she have done? She barely had enough to feed herself, as the growling of her stomach reminded her, and she didn’t have the platform to do a real expose on the situation.
Resting would have to wait. She started her sweep down the busier sections of the dock. As she passed by groups of laborers, some of them started yelling catcalls as well, but this time Joy plastered a polite, professional smile on her face, and headed over towards them. Groups of bored dock workers were much less dangerous than single roaming mashers. Most of them seemed rather startled as she introduced herself and started asking questions. It was almost like yelling random crap at passing women was a terrible way to get them to talk to you, to the point that they didn’t even expect it to “work.”
However, once they got over the awkwardness of having to deal with her as an actual person instead of a piece of passing scenery, she was able to start asking real questions, but unfortunately she wasn’t getting much that was useful. Most of them didn’t remember seeing someone matching Madame Zenovia’s description, and the few who did couldn’t say much, other than she wandered off to the west. She had less luck when asking about some sort of incident three nights ago, like a fight or a riot. The guys either didn’t know, or pretended they didn’t know, or hurriedly tried to hush up anyone who started to say anything about it.
When she pressed further, she got warned that her line of questioning was “dangerous,” and “some people” wouldn’t like it. After a few attempts, one worker let slip that “some people” meant “Mr. Ben Li Fang, one of the more colorful figures of post-war Dodona, a former pirate who also went by the name “Benny the Shark.”
During the Great War, the specialized, defensive nature of the Kallistrate navy meant that Central Command had to get creative when it came to naval offense, harassing shipping lanes between the various Albion territories, particularly the ones to the Sidhe homeland of Hybrassil. Rather than divert resources from the spikefruit convoys, Hardwicke’s government issued Letters of Marque to private ship captains, turning them into “Privateers,” authorized to attack any ships sailing to supply Albion territories and keep the spoils of their attacks from themselves. In short, it was legalized piracy.
Joy had never been keen on the practice, even though the military analysts said it had been effective. She didn’t like the idea of ruthless pirates attacking and looting civilian ships in Kallistrate’s name, because who but a pirate would become a privateer?
Benny the Shark was a prime example. She hadn’t seen pictures, but apparently the man had an unusually large jaw, and during his tenure as a pirate, he’d filed his teeth into sharp points, all the better to terrify the crews of the ships he’d boarded, hence the name. After being legitimized by his Letter of Marque, he’d settled down in Dodona, rich beyond imagining from all his legal plunder, his jagged smile covered in gold caps. Further rumors suggested that he hadn’t reformed at all, and now functioned as the local head of one of the Triad crime syndicates, trying to make inroads into the major trade cities of the Kallis Coast. Given the dock workers’ reactions to the mention of his name, Joy would guess those rumors to be true.
Joy tried explaining that she wasn’t planning on starting any trouble with Mr. Fang; she was freelancing for the Gazette on a Red Specter puff piece, but that didn’t have the reassuring effect she’d hoped for. Most of the dock workers were sure that the Red Specter was real, and were scared of him. If anything, he scared them worse than Benny the Shark, and that was something.
Joy managed to get a few ghost stories from some of the laborers. The Specter was a harbinger of death—the merest sight of him would spell your doom. He’d bide his time stalking you. No matter how far you ran—flee to Axum, flee to the northernmost edge of the frigid Dagan Sea, flee to the tiniest, most remote island in the Kotu Ring of
Fire—it wouldn’t make a shred of difference. The Red Specter would hunt you down, and you would never be seen again.
Of course, there were skeptics and scoffers, who claimed everyone else was just seeing things. The situation left Joy in a bit of a pickle. Those who believed in the Specter seemed unlikely to talk about actually seeing him, for fear of invoking his “curse,” and even got nervous when she said his name, while those who didn’t believe in him obviously hadn’t seen him. She tried asking them if they knew anyone else who claimed to see the Specter, but didn’t get anything solid. Still, the more people she talked to, the more Joy had a feeling that something was up. In each conversation, she could feel it, an underlying tension, like a giant invisible clock spring beneath their feet, getting wound a notch tighter every time she asked about what happened three nights ago or mentioned the Red Specter.
On something like the eighth or ninth round of this Joy managed to get a scrap of new information: the fracas from three nights ago had occurred on the pier where a ship named the Joanne Spaulding was moored. The name sounded familiar, though Joy couldn’t remember where she’d heard it from. A famous opera singer, maybe? She’d tried asking for the pier number, but instantly everybody clammed up, claimed they couldn’t remember.
Joy decided to move on and see if she could find the ship on her own, since she’d hit the point where her interviews were just giving her the same information, over and over again. She drifted over towards the sea side, scanning the prows of the larger ships for their names. Joy assumed the Joanne Spaulding would have to be one of the big ships in order to qualify as a landmark. But a fluttering in her stomach disrupted her concentration, as she realized that someone was following her.
The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1) Page 16
